


Finding General Hux

by ShutUpGinger (Chameowmile)



Series: Old Stories [2016] [4]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Grey Jedi Ben, Identity Porn, Jedi Ben Solo, M/M, Trans Armitage Hux, literally just an excuse to write copius identity porn, pre-starkiller divergence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 11:06:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6751516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chameowmile/pseuds/ShutUpGinger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A rising star with little fame yet, very few have ever seen General Hux, and so, when the makings of a new super-weapon, the Starkiller, are seized by the rebellion, no one knows where to look to find him in the ensuing chaos.</p><p>Aboard the Finalizer, Dopheld Mitaka and General Hux make a rather timely escape, soon finding themselves stranded on an undesignated planet, where they're rescued by a small crew of scrap-sellers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Finding General Hux

**Author's Note:**

> A universe in which Hux never reaches the point of firing the Star Killer, and the First Order instead falls apart by the hands of the rebellion

**-General Hux-**

Perhaps, were it not for their love of destroying his life’s work (and in such fiery displays, as well), he’d find himself more keen on negotiating with the rebels.

It is not, however, meant to be, as lights flash red, and alarms blare. The Finalizer gives another jolt as an escape pod is launched that sends him slamming into a corridor wall so heavily that his shoulder will surely bruise later.

He forces himself back to his feet, the ship partially righting itself in the process, and bitterly continues his sprint down the long hallway to what he certainly hopes will be safety.

The evacuation order went out nearly six minutes ago however, so it’s likely there won’t _be_ any escape pods left once he reaches them.

He tries not to think about this likelihood, instead forcing his way forward as an unsettling, robotic voice chimes a sixty second self-destruct warning over his head, reminding him yet again, that he's an idiot.

Another person would have sprinted the last few blocks of the ship, but instead, he slips, falling to the floor with a painful slam of his right knee, and a wince as the reality that he’s not going to make it begins to dawn on him.

An awful end, to an awful day.

The morning had greeted him with a migraine, dull at first, but increasing in intensity as a bizarre sense of unease began to infiltrate his every thought, to the point that when they finally activated the half-completed Starkiller base for a small test run two hours ago, he was almost grateful it didn’t shoot, knowing very well that he’d have fainted, had the bright beam actually gone off.

News of the Rebels was naturally not what he wanted to hear when he was quite rudely awaken from a short nap afterwards, and even more so he didn't want to hear that not even fifteen minutes ago Starkiller base had been claimed by the rebellion with General Ben Organa heading the charge as always.

Or so they had been led to believe. It seems that it was not the young General who commandeered the base after all, but rather another, whom Hux was unable to gain intel on while they used this attack as a diversion for their real one.

Moments after discovering this flawed intel news soon arrived that General Organa had in fact slain The Supreme Leader instead, no less than _eight_ minutes ago, and that the entire First Order fleet was now in the process of being overthrown by the enemy in a flurry of powerplays, and sleeper spy awakenings, so far entrenched into his order that some of those spies were apparently even his trusted commanders.

When the first ships came out of hyperspace _seven_ minutes ago, some of his own Star Destroyers included, he’d initiated evacuation protocol, sensing their failure, and had hit the Finalizer’s self destruct sequence. The evacuation was speedy, but in a haze of migraine induced pain, he hadn’t really considered the fact that all of his evacuated troops and officers had been doomed for capture anyway, nor the fact that there was little need to destroy the Finalizer in the first place when all it contained was intel that the rebels already had.

 _"Twenty Seconds until self destruct"_.

He flinches, unable to run any further and wonders if it’ll hurt when the incineration sequence begins.

Black spots and the strange sense of not being fully conscious make him doubt that it could be any worse than the migraine he already has.

The thought isn’t comforting though, and he thinks with some bitterness that fire always did frighten him.

 _Fifteen seconds until self destruct._.

Even in the academy, the thought of cremation after death made him sick to his stomach, but because it was standard, he often found himself imagining, rather vividly, what it must feel like to have one’s flesh rendered in such a manner, sucked and snapped from his shattering bones by the unforgiving maw of a funeral pyre.

The nightmares often accompanied him in sleep, and even when close acquaintances died, he'd feigned disinterest in them, shamefully refusing to attend their burnings as friends so often did.

_Ten seconds until self destruct._

The countdown comes more rapidly now, the computerized voice hastened as if preparing to make its _own_ leave from the doomed vessel, already one step out the door and ready to slam the air-lock shut.

_Nine seconds._

He screws his eyes shut.

_Seven seconds._

He counts to ten, and throws his hands over his ears to block out the cacophony around him, deafened by the thudding of his heart in the static silence.

But he doesn't die. He counts again for good measure.

And then a third time.

Against his better judgement, he pulls his hands away, eyes snapping back open, and looks up.

_“Two.”_

He flails in surprise, scrambling back against the wall as as the final, _“One.”_ reaches his ears.

 _“Self destruct, imminent.”_ It intones.

And so everything is bathed in darkness.

The whirring hum of the ship’s power slows to a halt as all goes silent. The artificial gravity departs in turn, leaving him with no solid surface to scrabble against as he finds himself rather strangely floating in the darkness.

Two thoughts occur to the General simultaneously.

Firstly, that his head hasn’t felt this good in hours.

And secondly, that this may very well be what death feels like.

With that last one, the supplementary, _“Maybe I’m_ already _dead.”_ is quick to arrive.

He’s snapped back to reality however when the lights return instantly with a deafening pop, the gravity slamming him harshly back into the floor hard enough to daze as his world glitters back to life inexplicably.

_Self destruct protocol, null._

He feels the strange urge to vomit at that, but instead just laughs nervously at this strange turn of events.

His mind doesn’t fully register the sound of footsteps approaching him, and even when they do arrive, he’s hardly in any state to protest when the person they belong to starts touching him, a hand on his face, and makes a point of divesting him of his greatcoat and officer’s tunic thereafter.

Eyes still sparkling with his migraine, he barely recognizes the familiar figure of Dopheld Mitaka helping him up onto his feet and checking his temperature as his mother used to by way of an offered hand, simply opting to stumble along in the direction that the man bids him to.

 

**-Dopheld Mitaka-**

He’s not entirely sure what compels him to cancel the self-destruct sequence. Perhaps it's simple sentimentality for the vessel he’s spent so many years on, or just the fear of losing his own life, but he finds the fact that there's no one left to punish him rather comforting in the process of it. Though he canceled it about five seconds before it was meant to initiate, and he had no amount of certainty that his efforts would work, he found himself feeling rather calm throughout the entirety of his ordeal, even musing over the strange emptiness that a lack of fear can cause in a person while he apathetically succumbed to zero gravity. 

When he finally landed back on his feet, staring down at the monitors in awe, he decided to take the long way back to the escape pods, feeling that he should at least get a nice long last look of his home before leaving it forever. It was in this desire that he chanced upon the general huddled down in a hallway that Dopheld never would have had the clearance to step foot in had the ship still been operating.

His first instinct is to fall to attention, or panic, but when Hux’s strange, chilling laughter reaches his ears, he steps forward instead, worried the man may have finally snapped.

What he finds however is an obvious fever licking its way through the man's system which is cause enough for him to remove the heavy gabberwool of his greatcoat, and then, with a second’s thought, his officer’s tunic as well, rendering him no more substantial or important than any other troop in the First Order.

He's always had a strange amount of respect for the slight redheaded man. But he supposes that it's only natural for an officer to respect his general.

**-Ben Organa-**

Somehow, the self-destruct was canceled. Likely the work of an errant crewmember who got left behind, though Ben doesn’t particularly care at the moment and really just wants to know if it’s General Hux that did it.

Without any real knowledge of what the only recently appointed general looks like, all they’ve managed to get from anybody are rough physical descriptions. Red hair, and a waifish appearance. They haven’t even been able to get a consistent eye color, with everybody’s account conflicting to the point that Ben would guess the man is either an alien, or they don't know what they're talking about.

At first he’d thought red hair would be an easy enough trait to recognize, but after finding himself in the possession of over four hundred redheads from the Finalizer alone, the crew substantially larger than he'd thought it would be, he comes to realize that it may not be as easy as he thought.

Not to mention the man very well may have dyed his hair by this point, and every moment they wait, dawdling and interrogating the prisoners, he’s getting further and further away.

Ben will _not_ allow the Order’s second highest authority to escape, and so he boards the Finalizer, in the hopes of finding the man in question so that he can drag him back to their base.

**Mitaka**

He doesn’t entirely understand what happened. Well, he does, but he doesn’t want to believe it.

All of the ships, the Finalizer included, have gone into hyperspace. Not too shocking on its own, since they've likely been hijacked and sent to wherever they need to go for the Rebellion to process them, but alarming none-the-less, simply because of the fact that it happened while they were in the middle of undocking their escape pod.

The sheer force of the hyperspace jump knocks the half detached pod’s hardware out completely, sending them shooting off into space mid leap, spinning at an alarming rate, like a cue-ball across a tile floor.

Equilibrium thoroughly rattled, the G-force knocks the both of them unconscious almost instantly, neither even aware of the crash they've endured until several minutes later, when Dopheld blearily finds himself in the sandy wreckage of their smoking craft, aching all over and stunned into silence.

The sand surrounding him is red, but he has no time to ponder this as he’s suddenly being hoisted up onto his feet by people quick to arrive to the scene.

 

**-Hux-**

His migraine’s gone.

That’s about the only good thing he can say about the current situation.

Well, that and he's not dead yet.

Also these people seem friendly enough.

“I don’t remember what happened.” He mumbles a bit haughtily after being asked the question once more, which is true enough, though he could have easily supplied more answers if he'd wanted to. He doesn't however understand where he is or how he got here, considering the Finalizer wasn't even docked near any desert planets and thus, couldn't have left him on one. He does however have some vague memory of being helped aboard a shuttle pod by a stray Lieutenant from the weapon's bay. 

The man currently holding him hostage, (or more accurately, forcing him to stay wrapped in a shock blanket so he can recover) is quite obviously subhuman, though Hux is unfamiliar with the particular race. Dark tan skin contrasts sharply against the man’s blue eyes, and hair so pink Hux would have sworn it was dyed, were it not for the fact that his eyebrows and stubble are just the same.

He seems to smile a-lot, in the cheeky, up-to-no-good, Correllian way, but otherwise, nothing in his attitude indicates he’s actually here to cause trouble. According to him, his crew and he were just flying over the area, when all of the sudden an escape pod came and nearly broke off their left propulsion engine.

Lo and behold it was _their_ escape pod, and so, naturally, when the man came to investigate, he found Hux and his mysterious Lieutenant, in the wreckage.

In response to no question or concern murmured, the man gestures calmly back toward the clunky old freighter that seems to be his, and smiles as if he knows just what Hux is thinking.

The nerve.

“Your friend was in pretty bad shape, so I had him sent to our little medical unit. You can visit him in a second if you want, figure you should be making your way over there in a minute, anyway. Looks like you both need a bit of help."

Hux scowls.

"And who exactly is it that's helping us?”

The man lights up, either too oblivious, or too good natured to notice the venom in his tone. 

“Lee Mai.” He replies, shaking Hux's limp hand with little care that his friendliness is not reciprocated as he looks his ship over with an odd sense of pride. “Run a scrapmetal business. Need new crew though, you wanna join?”

Despite his pleasantries, Hux has been taught better than to trust the sincerity of the final statement, suspicion flaring immediately. He wouldn’t think he'd already have a bounty on his head, but an invite that eager and sudden could only mean they want him aboard their ship for a reason

“And why should I?””

The man shrugs in apparent amusement.

“No reason, unless you wanna live out the rest of your imminent lifespan on this uninhabited little hellhole.”

That last part, said more with amusement than threat, makes Hux start, blinking back as he realizes they really are in the middle of fuck knows where and he somehow missed that point.

“The kriff are we even at?”

“Undesignated Sector BB20512, failed to meet terraforming requirements, and so was abandoned.” Grins the trader smugly. “Along with all its terraforming machinery, which brings a pretty penny back on just about everywhere.”

“Well in that case..." He pauses and for once in his life can't think of a snarky retort to the statement said, instead being struck by the reality of the situation. “Whatever, fine, I'll go with you, but I’d like to see my colleague now.”

“Probably for the best.” Lee muses, turning away with a wink. “Skin so fair is bound to burn if we spend another minute out here. The atmosphere on this planet is thin, so you're probably already gonna need something for it."

**-Lee Mai-**

“They’re obviously criminals, Lee.” Isani, his young twilek co-captain gripes. “We’re not for that lifestyle.”

“They’re in trouble, sweets.” He mumbles distractedly, typing some new coordinates into their nav-computer and smiling. “And if I were to guess I’d say they’re First Order. Organa was planning that attack today, if you recall.”

“So why are we helping them?” She asks, sun-gold skin flushing slightly orange with irritation. “You said we weren’t gonna get involved with either side, but I think taking refugees can be considered _getting involved_.”

“Because, my dear, we are merely humble junkers, and have no place in this war to discriminate.” He smirks. “Besides, neither of them had a particularly intimidating presence, so I doubt they’re more than entry-level officers at best. Nobody will miss them.”

Finally managing to activate a door panel behind him, that has, for the past six minutes, refused to work, she huffs, and haughtily departs the cockpit, leaving him to grin cheekily as he reseals the door with a simple wave of his hand.

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to leave a comment/kudos, or find me on tumblr at kevin-the-chicken.tumblr.com uvu
> 
> <3 thanks for reading


End file.
